I do not know whether the wattle-work has been perpetuated on any object as a skeuomorph, but it is possible that the shape of similarly constructed huts has been continued, as Mr. Charles de Kay suggests,[28] into the round towers of Ireland. He says, “Seeing how the Irish kept heathen ideas in other things, we can perceive how the round wicker house of the Kelt, such as we see it carved on the column of Antoninus at Rome, developed into the wood and wicker outlook tower and beacon, and in skilful hands became the Irish round tower. Christian in usage, they are pagan in design.”
The predatory expeditions of the Scandinavians created a demand for watch-towers and places of temporary refuge; the pattern for these was supplied by the traditional erections of the Gauls, but their translation into “towers more durable, useful, simple yet stately, than anything Ireland had seen before or has seen since,” was due to the skill and experience of “Byzantine craftsmen driven from the East by the bigotry of the image-breaking emperors.”
Mr. de Kay also calls attention to the encircling stone bands, or “string-courses,” as in the round tower at Ardmore, “which repeat, without any useful object in stone, the horizontal bands that strengthened the tall wicker house of the Gauls. Such apparently trivial points weigh heavily in favour of the indigenous character of the round tower of Ireland.”
The interlacing of flexible bands, such as strips of bast, entire leaves as of grass, or shreds of large leaves, is known to almost every people, and is employed in making mats. When the elements employed are all of one size, and when the plaiting is straight, the intersections form regular equilateral rectangles or squares. (Plate [II.], Fig. 3, and compare the transferred design in Fig. [50].) If the material consists of two colours simple patterns are readily produced, but of necessity the patterns must consist of straight, slanting, or zigzag lines; curves are an impossibility. The same holds good for nearly all forms of matting and basketry which is made of strips of one material, but the constructional surface marking may be rectangles of various shapes and sizes instead of simple squares. (Plate [II.], Fig. 4.) When one series of the components is twisted, as in Plate [II.], Fig. 5, there is a kind of flow effect in the intersections.
The making of baskets by laying down the material in a spiral gives rise to different effects, especially when coloured strips are interwoven for decorative purposes—as, for example, in some African baskets and the baskets made by the natives of South Australia, in the neighbourhood of Adelaide. Dr. Keller found in the Lake of Robenhausen a kind of basketry formed by bast, the fibre of the lime-tree, intertwisted among a series of willow rods, the strips “running concentrically in such a way that both together form a structure like that called ‘herring-bone.’”[29] (Plate [II.], Fig. 2.) It is possible that the pattern in the middle band of Fig. [49], and some of those in Fig. [50], may have been suggested by basketry or plaited fans.
An early type of basket is seen in the Roman corbula (Plate [II.], Fig. 6), in which the osier rods are placed rectangularly; another, in an ivory plaque from Boulak (Plate [II.], Fig. 7), in which there is a chevron arrangement. The latter is the more common skeuomorph on European prehistoric pottery, but the rectangular type often occurs, and it may be seen on a Danish food-vessel of the Stone Age. (Plate [II.], Fig. 8.)
The bottom of a basket, with a cruciform arrangement of the bands, due to the method of weaving, was discovered by Dr. Keller in the Terramara marl-pits of Northern Italy (Plate [II.], Fig. 9); and a piece of pottery from the same deposit is ornamented with a corresponding skeuomorph (Plate [II.], Fig. 10).
Dr. Colley March has further developed this subject, and, while I cannot commit myself to several of his conclusions, I do not hesitate to give an exposition of his ingenious views, as they are very suggestive, and even if they are not finally accepted, they will lead to a further examination of the problems:—
“The perpetual concentration of attention, the strain of hand and eye and brain upon the forms of wattle-work and basketry produced an important decorative result. The mind acquired an expectancy of a special mode of curved repetitions. This particular skeuomorph is composed of a band that winds in and out among a row of rods or discs.” (Plate [III.], Fig. A.)